RIP Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

I just found out about the great baritone's death on Sunday, while catching up on my Google Reader RSS feed; I've been so immersed in following the Cannes Film Festival. I grew up on Fischer-Dieskau's Schubert Lieder recordings, but heard him on LPs in a vast repertoire; he was the most recorded classical singer of any era, after all. If memory serves, I don't believe I was ever lucky enough to hear him in person; he sang live mostly in Europe (never taking the stage at New York's Metropolitan Opera, for example). His fellow singer Elizabeth Schwarzkopf called him "a born god who has it all." My favorite contemporary baritone, Thomas Hampson, has said:

Few artists achieve the level of recognition, admiration and influence of Fischer-Dieskau, and even fewer live to see, that influence realised during their own lifetime. Ushering in the modern recording era, he challenged our perception and processes of how recordings could be made, explored the possibilities of modern recording and exploited the potential for popularity of classical music; and all this while setting standards of artistic achievement, integrity, risk-talking, and the aesthetic ideal that became our new norm. Wherever we bask in the beauty of his tone, revere the probing, questioning power of his intellect, or simply wonder at the astonishing physical abilities through all that he has achieved in his long recording career, we must also pause and say THANK YOU to this great artist, whose legacy, like a great and bright star lighting the way for those who follow in his passion for singing, is exemplary in every way.

The British music critic John Amis wrote:

Providence gives to some singers a beautiful voice, to some musical artistry, to some (let us face it) neither, but to Fischer-Dieskau Providence has given both. The result is a miracle, and that is just about all there is to be said about it.

Here are obituaries at the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the New York Times: 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/may/18/dietrich-fischer-dieskau 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/music-obituaries/9275911/Dietrich-Fischer-Dieskau.html 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/arts/music/dietrich-fischer-dieskau-german-baritone-dies-at-86.html?ref=music&gwh=CE48ACB4E2531A8F4198B4EA80D52445 

And here is New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's initial reaction (his links are good, too): 

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2012/05/for-dietrich-fischer-dieskau.html 

Anthony Tommasini pays tribute at the New York Times: 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/arts/music/dietrich-fischer-dieskaus-incomparable-voice.html?_r=2&ref=music 

Fischer-Dieskau was every bit as great an opera singer as a Lieder singer, equally good in Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Richard Strauss - how many could say that? And he was an inspired interpreter of Mahler as well. 

Not least among his legacies is his commitment to modern music. He was one of the three soloists for whom Benjamin Britten's great War Requiem was written (the others being Peter Pears and Galina Vishnevskaya). He was a tremendous Wozzeck in Berg's opera. In fact, he always took on the most challenging parts, such as Busoni's Doktor Faust and Hindemith's Mathis der Maler. Aribert Reimann's opera Lear was written for him, and he sang the lead in the premiere of Hans Werner Henze's sublime Elegy for Young Lovers. No one else was so good in such a varied repertory. 

Here is a Schubert performance by Fischer-Dieskau and his great accompanist Gerald Moore, some 50 years ago:

 

Shep Smith, You Go, Guy!

This has already gone viral, but I cannot resist giving my own "Attaboy!" to Shep Smith's blow for sanity:



Politics is weird, and creepy, and now I know lacks even the loosest attachment to anything like reality.

On her own show, Rachel Maddow was agog with admiration, and it is safe to say that the nation's intelligentsia (such as we are) was right there with her.

British Forthrightness

I get the Telegraph (U.K.) obituaries in my Google Reader feed, and I laughed out loud today when I spotted this:

Charles Higham

Bitchy biographer who tarnished the names of Errol Flynn and the Duchess of Windsor, among many others 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9250507/Charles-Higham.html

Looking at the obit itself after that memorable tag, one sees:

His most sensational work was Errol Flynn: The Untold Story (1980), in which he alleged that the swashbuckling matinee idol was an unscrupulous Nazi spy and rampant bisexual whose appetites led him to Mexico for the procurement of young boys and who had affairs with Truman Capote, Howard Hughes and Tyrone Power — to name only a few.... 

The Flynn biography was a fairly typical example of Higham’s approach, and much of what he wrote about the rich and famous (particularly those who were no longer alive to sue) was regarded by many critics as the product of an overactive and self-serving imagination.

In his unashamedly self-promoting memoir, In and Out of Hollywood (2009), Higham presented himself as a sort of Chandleresque figure, dedicated to sniffing out other people’s darkest secrets. Yet as he admitted, he hated interviewing people for his books, and critics remarked on how much of his work was based on the testimony of anonymous witnesses.

....His Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life (1988) might have been more aptly titled “Fascist, Lesbian Harlots at the Court of St James”, suggested one reviewer, who went on to observe that for the Duchess to have been guilty of even half the peccadilloes attributed to her, “early on she would have succumbed to exhaustion”.

....Higham was not pleasant company. He had an irritating habit of insulting waiters in restaurants, and often sat at the table for 45 minutes before deigning to consult the menu.

Can you imagine this appearing in a U.S. newspaper equal in stature to The Telegraph, which is not some rag (they have those too)? Sacre bleu! Equally good is another fresh obit:

Angelica Garnett

Artist and writer who was brought up in the Bloomsbury Group and married her father's lover

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/9250509/Angelica-Garnett.html

The illegitimate daughter of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (conceived when Grant decided to take a rare break from his usual rampant homosexuality), Angelica grew up thinking that the art critic Clive Bell was her father (although her true parentage was an open secret among her parents’ friends). When she was 17 she was informed by her mother that Grant was her father, and then told never to mention the subject.

At the age of 24 Angelica married the writer and publisher David Garnett (known to everyone as “Bunny”), 50 years old and one of Grant’s former lovers. A serial philanderer, Bunny had lived with Grant and Vanessa Bell (whom he had also propositioned, though unsuccessfully) at Charleston, East Sussex....

Nobody told Angelica that she was about to marry one of her father’s former lovers....Their flirtation began while Garnett was still married to his first wife, and became “a courtship ... about which I had very ambivalent feelings” following his wife’s death from cancer. Angelica lost her virginity to Garnett in HG Wells’s spare room, and in 1942 they married. Vanessa, oddly, seemed to approve of her daughter having an affair with her husband’s ex-lover, but not of the marriage. Neither of Angelica’s parents was invited to the wedding.

Virginia Woolf was horrified, confiding to her diary the hope that Angelica would “tire of that rusty, surly old dog with his amorous ways and his primitive mind”. But no one supplied Angelica with the vital information that might have led her to call off the marriage.

The economist John Maynard Keynes made some sort of effort to warn her, but, like everyone else, failed to come clean about what the problem might be: “He sent for me or he had me to tea or something and he tried to talk about it, and warn me that it might not be a very good idea. And I wish I’d listened to him, really, but naturally I couldn’t because I was in love with Bunny.”

Love the specificity of "H.G. Wells's spare room"....I imagine that The Telegraph obituary desk must be a jolly place to hang out, not to mention going for pints afterwards and laughing uproariously well past midnight. Gotta love those Brits. I certainly do.

More on The Tree of Life

An obvious comparison that many have made is between The Tree of Life and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have never heard anyone intelligent complain about "The Dawn of Man" sequence in Kubrick's film or say that they didn't get why it was there. When you have the whole film in mind, the thematic linkages are very obvious, and the way that the early sequence "enlarges" the later sequences should be easily grasped by almost anyone who has some experience of movies.

Even before you have the whole film in mind, while you are watching it for the first time, "The Dawn of Man" fits easily into the experience, in part because of Kubrick's thrilling match-cut of the caveman's bone to the spaceship. That moves any reasonably receptive viewer aesthetically; it is an example of what Hitchcock would call "pure film."

I don't get any similar sensation from Malick's history of the universe. Some will like that sequence better, some (such as me) worse, but in relation to the rest of the film, it feels like a "stand-alone," as my friend Saul Manjarrez put it to me.

The Sean Penn scenes and the conclusion on the beach offer different challenges. I found the contemporary scenes beautiful to look at, largely because of the effective use of low camera angles to convey the strangeness of the modern city. That does form a nice visual contrast to the home-town Texas scenes. But the contemporary scenes and Penn's very game acting in them, although clearly emotional, are also emotionally inarticulate - as I wrote earlier, I just don't think there is enough information in them. Surely Penn's obvious unhappiness doesn't stem solely from his brother's suicide, from one moment in his life. People do move on. It's as if the thirty years in-between his boyhood and his present didn't matter at all, that nothing happened during them, that he did not live them. Odd, to say the least.

The beach sequence is to my mind the least defensible part of the movie. I get it thematically, but it is embarrassingly trite. Watching it, I felt bad that someone with persuasive power hadn't talked Malick out of including it in the film. Sure, let the director film the sequence if he needs to get it out of his system, but let it stop there. I have not read any defenses of this ending that are even slightly convincing to me.

POSTSCRIPT: When I speak of the brother's suicide, I should be careful; it isn't actually stated as such in the movie. All we know is that he died. We are not give much information in this instance, either, to have any basis for understanding the event or the other characters' reactions to it. For someone who so obviously uses Freudian Oedipal concepts, Malick seems very disdainful of psychology in other ways. In several places, he denies us the data for psychological insight. All we can do is guess.

My friend Robert Kennedy has suggested that the mother's example will always be with her boys. Jessica Chastain is indeed luminous, and does about as good a job of embodying an abstract concept like "the way of grace" as any actor could. Her message is joyful. It is curious, then, that the message seems not to have "taken" with the grown Jack. Penn seems miserable, about as far from leading a life of joy as a life-prisoner. Was the mother's message that weak in relation to the father's message? Is that what the movie is saying? It sure doesn't say much for the way of grace if that is true - doubly so if the second son did commit suicide, since one thing suicides uniformly have in common is that they can find no joy in life. If at least one or two of three sons can find no joy in life after having such a mother, what chance is there for anyone else? Roger Ebert finds The Tree of Life hopeful and positive, in part because of the imagined reconciliations on the beach. But I do not. Imagined reconciliations are not enough. For the movie to be truly hopeful, Penn's grown-up Jack should glow with an inner light. I don't see one.

SECOND POSTSCRIPT:  A lot of us read the suicide into the movie because of the suicide of Malick's own brother. Nothing in the movie contradicts that reading. Malick underlines the similarity of the second brother in the movie to his own youngest brother by including those scenes of guitar-playing. It was during his advanced guitar training that Larry Malick "broke his own hands due to pressure over his musical studies," and then killed himself (in 1968). In the movie, Brad Pitt's father expresses regret over not pursuing a musical career, and it is easy to extrapolate from the combination of information inside the movie and outside the movie that a father like that might indeed pressure his musically talented son. If Malick didn't want us to perform those combinations, he shouldn't have made the movie so closely reflective of his autobiographical reality.

By the way, Malick's other brother Chris "was badly burned in a car crash that killed his wife" - you'll recall that burns play a part in The Tree of Life, too.

http://stillsearching.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/39-facts-about-terrence-malick/

(I had no idea that Malick was in the same American Film Institute class with David Lynch and Paul Schrader? The mind boggles. I wonder if the three men are friends.)

One critic I read suggested that the brother's death in The Tree of Life could have been a military death, but I don't think that's possible. During the Vietnam War and thereafter, the military services used Casualty Notification Officers to visit families with the bad news. (Up through the Korean War, telegrams were used.) Of course, the death in the movie could have been an accident. The reason for the death is simply not explicitly stated.

Culiacan Zoo

[Cross-posted from ZooChat.]  I am an American teaching at a top-notch Mexican university high school or "prepa" in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state on the west coast. Culiacan is about two hours from the popular resort of Mazatlan, also in Sinaloa. This is not a tourist town, possibly because it has a reputation as one of the two biggest centers of the Mexican drug traffic (along with Ciudad de Juarez). But it is actually a quite pleasant city to live in. 

The Culiacan Zoo is only a few blocks from my house, part of a larger park complex, and so I have visited it a number of times, including today. It is a charming and popular small zoo. The animals seem healthy and well cared for; I have not noticed any obviously neurotic behaviors. The enclosures seem generally appropriate, and are full of variety for the animals; there are no bare or depressing enclosures. The enclosures for the big cats could be bigger, but they are no means bad; there are ponds for bathing, plenty of material for climbing and playing, and places to hide and take a break from the public. The whole zoo is pleasantly shady, which is a good thing because it does get quite hot and humid here in the summer.

Here are some of the features and species you will find at the Culiacan Zoo:

Tigers (including a white tiger), lions, jaguars, leopards (very perky today; they looked great), cheetahs, caracals, wolves, hyenas

Chimpanzees, Geoffroy's spider monkeys, lemurs, Hamadryas baboons

A variety of smaller monkeys, including a separate house for titis

I have seen black bears before, but not today

Coatis, raccoons

A large hippo enclosure with a pair who seemed to be having a blast in their pond today

A kangaroo/wallaby enclosure that also houses giant tortoises and Patagonian cavies

The largest enclosure in the zoo includes giraffes, zebras, ostriches, multiple species of deer, antelopes, and wild sheep, and capybaras - not exactly geographically coherent, but pleasant

A flamingo/swan pond

A petting zoo

A herpetarium with a nice array of species, including many snakes and lizards and some tarantulas

A king vultures exhibit

A very large, multi-level, well-designed flight cage (including a pond) with a wide variety of parrots (including a thriving colony of hyacinth macaws), toucans, ground fowl, and waterbirds

Some Notes on The Tree of Life

I watched The Tree of Life over two evenings - the first hour on the first night, the rest of the 139-minute movie on the second night. I watched it on DVD on a medium-sized screen, not on Blu-Ray on a bigger screen, and therefore not under the optimal conditions that cineaste friends recommended (not within my current ability to create). I posted an interim report after watching the first hour:

- I am not sold on the history of the universe sequence. I'm not speaking to its place in the overall structure of the film, which I don't fully know yet, but to its qualities in itself. Both the visuals and the voiceover feel trite to me. I suspect that Robert Bresson would be appalled by the tackiness.

- Half-way in, I sort of feel that the movie hasn't started yet. Although, the history of the universe sequence aside, it looks great.

- At its best, the spirituality of the first half of The Tree of Life represents a kind of country church naivete, touching but strikingly devoid of theological, philosophical, or intellectual content. At its worst, with its rote phraseology and celestial choirs, it suggests greeting-card Christianity.

- I say all that in the full knowledge that Malick was a summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, majoring in philosophy, and is a published translator of Heidegger. Hmm.

- Reviewing the film in The New Yorker, Anthony Lane shrewdly points out something I would not have noticed on my own: the Sean Penn scenes are the very first in any Malick movie that are set in the present. Lane says, " It is no sin to veer away from your own time—indeed, to stick doggedly to it can smack of historical vanity—but the suspicion lingers that Malick finds something distasteful in our current mores." In the first half of the movie, these contemporary scenes, although striking-looking, give me very little in the way of information to work with.

- Malick's writing of the voice-overs he is so fond of seems to have gotten vague and windy compared to the frequently marvelous lines that Linda Manz delivers so memorably in Days of Heaven. None of the language in the first half of The Tree of Life comes remotely close to such simple, powerful writing as the last lines of Days of Heaven: "I was hopin' things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine."

- Malick seems to want his movies to be all transcendence without connecting tissue, and he comes reasonably close to achieving that in Days of Heaven, but this time I'm not feeling it. Soaring flights are more impressive when a movie spends some time on the ground. Telling a story is a good way of accomplishing that grounding, but in The Tree of Life, Malick seems less interested in story-telling than ever.

- Like some other grandiose directors, Malick is notably weak in a sense of comedy. I can easily imagine the crew of Mystery Science Theater 3000 - or the Woody Allen of the period circa Love and Death - taking down The Tree of Life with some devastating one-liners. It wouldn't be fair, but in his super-solemnity, Malick kind of invites it. If you want to make do entirely without humor in your work, you had better be so impressive that no one thinks of the lack - you had better be a Bresson. Spiritually ambitious novelists like Dostoevsky don't do without humor - in fact, their comedy can be particularly cutting and intense.

- This is not an especially feminist film, is it? Jessica Chastain's mother is unrealistically perfect, in keeping with her symbolic function of representing "the way of grace" (a theme which Malick plops quite nakedly into the film instead of letting us figure it out on our own). She exists solely for the sake of her three boys and her husband, and has no separate status in her own right. I'm well aware that Malick had two younger brothers (one of whom committed suicide) and no sister, but in creating the movie, he might have challenged himself by putting a sister into the mix. With one, I suspect it could have been a richer and more universal movie, and Chastain's character might not have seemed as if she was being sacrificed on the altar of patriarchal continuity.

After viewing the rest, I wrote further:

The second hour of The Tree of Life is a lot better than the first hour – unfortunately, the last 15 minutes is bad. If I had been Malick’s executive producer, I know exactly what I would have done. I would have fought him tooth-and-nail on the following points:

- Excise the history of the universe segment, in its entirety. In my opinion, if you have to include the history of the universe to prove your story is universal, you’re in deep trouble as an artist.

- Excise all the Sean Penn footage, including the ghastly ending on the beach. It all adds nothing. This probably means the brother’s suicide goes, too – everything that lies in the future as related to the body of the movie. End on the car pulling away from the house in Waco.

- Change the title to something less grandiloquent. Lose some of the over-explicit spiritual voiceovers - Jessica Chastain’s “way of nature, way of grace” monologue, and some of Hunter McCracken’s less natural locutions (“Mother, father, you are always wrestling within me,” etc.).

 - Re-edit the Texas sequences slightly to reinforce the sense of a story – or two stories, actually, McCracken’s coming-of-age and Pitt’s career disappointment.

What would be left would be an exquisite, 80-minute poetic feature, not flawless by any means, but awfully good and maybe even worthy of that Palme d’Or (which the current version, in my opinion, is not).

Some commentators have written that any such suggestions as I have made are equivalent to telling Herman Melville to cut all the extraneous stuff from Moby Dick, but that presumes that Malick is Melville’s equal as an artist, and I hate to disappoint everyone, but he’s not that. As I suggested earlier, he’s not Bresson either, nor Tarkovsky, nor Bergman, nor Kubrick. He’s not of that caliber; he’s not as robust as those directors. He’s a rather fragile talent who needs to be saved from his own gas attacks.

I stand by all of my earlier comments, pretty much. Jessica Chastain’s mother does show a little more mettle and individuality in the second half. I like the way the movie moves into Oedipal territory. Chastain is young, gorgeous, and very physically free with her boys, and given the lack of a sister for balance, that sets up a real tension; I’m glad this was explored. Brad Pitt is tremendous in his role, and the father’s sense of his placement in the economic scheme of things, which doesn’t come up in the first half, adds true depth to the second. I guess that part of my complaint with The Tree of Life is that it takes so long to get to its good stuff, which is often very good, indeed. The dinosaurs are just a delay, as too much of that first hour is.

Having flayed Malick for his lack of humor, I will admit that the scene with the DDT truck is in the nature of a sick joke, and a pretty funny one, too!

The scenes with Laramie Eppler (a ringer for a boy Brad Pitt) playing the guitar are affecting in a way that, strictly speaking, is extrinsic to the movie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrence_Malick

Malick had two younger brothers: Chris and Larry. Larry Malick was a guitarist who went to study in Spain with Segovia in the late 1960s. In 1968, Larry intentionally broke his own hands due to pressure over his musical studies. Emil went to Spain to help Larry, but Larry died shortly after, apparently committing suicide.

Malick is famously private and refuses to give interviews or answer questions about his family, but it would be disingenuous of him to take offense at viewers interpreting his movie in the light of information that is publicly available, and that the film seems to be in dialogue with.

Finally, it should go without saying that anyone interested in film needs to see The Tree of Life for themselves and make up their own mind about it.

POSTSCRIPT: Within my group, the question came up as to why I watched the film over two nights - my usual procedure these days. Not too difficult to explain. 

First, I put in really long days at my teaching job . Officially, my day goes from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, but usually in actuality from 6:30 AM to 7:00 PM, and I get home at 8:00. I am wiped out at that point, and have to hit the hay by 10:00 at the latest in order to start all over again the next morning. I don't have a lot of time to play with - an hour of a film, or one TV episode, or a few chapters of a novel, is usually all that I am able to manage. It's better than nothing. Weekends offer more time, but I'm doubly wiped out by the weekend, and nap a lot on Saturdays and Sundays.

Second, I'm on - and will be on for the rest of my life - a prescription medication for which some of the side effects are diminished energy and fatigue. My doctors and I worked out that the optimal timing for my daily dose is late afternoon. If I take it at bedtime, I can't wake up in the morning; if I take it when I wake up, I fall asleep at work. So most of the time when I settle in to watch a film, the medicine is starting to creep up on me, and when I begin to feel that it is interfering with my focus, I call it a night. The DVD will still be there tomorrow, and I appreciate that.

My circumstances are just my circumstances, but who doesn't have circumstances nowadays? It's the New Global Economy. In Korea my hours were worse - 6:30 AM to 10:00 PM, every weekday. It's the price one pays for being employed at all - and at least now in Mexico, I have a good job, one that I like.

For every one person who is so fortunate as to be able to arrange their life in keeping with the demands of the Church of Art - usually someone comfortably well off as a result of the family they were born into (I know some such) - there are a thousand who would like to, but cannot. Given that I choose not to be in a relationship, not to have a family, and that part of the reason I opt against those is that they would cut into my intellectual time - well, I consider that I do my best.

Short Take: Steven Spielberg

Last week I had the fun experience of using the opening Omaha Beach sequence of Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan in my two World History classes. Oddly, none of the students had ever seen it before. The boys uniformly thought it was awesome, but a few of the girls couldn't take the gore and asked to excuse themselves. I found that rather gratifying, actually - it demonstrated the power of the scene, which to my mind is the greatest stretch of film-making that Spielberg has ever created. If it were someone other than him and Tom Hanks involved, the scene would have a far higher standing among cineastes. The shot of the bewildered soldier picking up his severed own arm and wandering off with it is worthy of Kurosawa, Bergman, or anyone else you might care to mention. I used a lot of video clips - documentary and fiction - in the year-long history course, but none better than this one at putting you inside the historical experience.

Short Take: Dante

I'm teaching Dante in my Art History/Literary History class, since we have arrived at the Middle Ages. I am using the Mark Musa translation of The Divine Comedy published by Penguin, which reads beautifully.

Dante was a fervent Christian believer, and that is putting it mildly. Dante firmly believed that all non-believers would go to hell and would suffer torments. He takes obvious relish in describing those torments. His theological position, the norm at the time, is so extreme that he believes that every human being who lived before Christ - including great benefactors of mankind such as Plato and Aristotle - went to hell because they did not accept Christ as their savior, even though there was no Christ in existence to accept yet. Tough luck, Greeks!

I do not share Dante's world-view - I reject it. He was deeply influential for centuries (and still). His influence undoubtedly had a pernicious side to it. And yet - he is one of the greatest writers who ever walked the planet, and there is nothing even mildly controversial about that view.

So what do I do? I deeply admire his artistry, reject most of his attitudes, and teach him in historical context. It seems to be a reasonable response to the complex of facts.

POSTSCRIPT: I mentioned to my students that for every thousand readers who tackle the Inferno, maybe one reads the Paradiso. People like the grotesque horror-movie side of Dante - boiling rivers of blood, sinners with their entrails hanging out, and suchlike.

POSTSCRIPT: This video response to the Inferno that I found on YouTube is strikingly well-done, with a killer soundtrack. My students certainly enjoyed it. There are a Purgatorio and Paradiso in the same series, which I have yet to watch.

Bullies

Regarding the subject of the new documentary Bully, which I haven't seen yet, I have a classic story. Given what a nerd and a bookworm I was, I wasn't bullied that badly as a kid, and I held my own fairly well. But when I was a freshman at my my Catholic boys' prep school, there was this upperclassman, Bob P., who lived to bully and who did what he could to make me and my buddy Seth Cornwall miserable on the long school bus rides. Seth was an eccentric and rather delicate kid who had developed a passion for Russian Orthodoxy; he and I would have long talks about Czar Nicholas II and suchlike topics. (He later became a celebrated modern iconographer and, alas, died way too young.) The ungainly Bob P. would taunt us verbally, and sometimes physically by means of his henchman Richard B. I felt quite strongly that the two of them were sorry excuses for human beings, but I survived their attentions without any permanent damage, and had a pleasant moment on the last bus ride of freshman year when I dumped a large Coca-Cola all over Richard B. and his new pimpin' outfit (silk shirt open to the navel, tight polyester bell-bottoms - it was 1973).

Richard B. and Seth Cornwall both transferred to new schools after that year; I forget whether Bob P. graduated that year or the next.

Flash-forward to the Google Era, and one day while I was tooling around the Internet I thought, I wonder whatever happened to those guys? I couldn't make a definitive ID on Richard B. But Bob P. was easy enough to find; his family was still in New Jersey. And guess what? He was in prison! He and his brother, actually, both convicted of real estate fraud, quite a big scheme too. My expression of Schadenfreude was completely undignified and completely satisfying. "Yes!!" I leapt out of my chair. "There is a God!" Absolutely a moment I will never forget.

African Film Noir

A South African production described as a "modern-day film noir," Charlie Vundla's How to Steal 2 Million, was featured at the recently completed New York African Film Festival:

http://nigeriantimes.blogspot.mx/2012/04/nigerian-films-in-spotlight-at-new-york.html

http://www.africanfilmny.org/2012/19th-ny-african-film-festival/

How to Steal 2 Million. Charlie Vundla, 2011, South Africa, Digital; 90m

Five long years...that’s how long Jack spent in prison after getting pinched for robbery. His partner in crime and best friend, Twala, never got caught and Jack never talked. But Twala proved as treacherous as Jack is honourable by marrying Jack’s former fiancée during his prison term. Upon being released, Jack decides to go straight. He wants to start a construction business, but after being rejected for a loan he must find a new source of capital. An opportunity presents itself when Twala suggests they do a home invasion with a take worth two million South African Rand. The intended victim: Twala’s father, Julius. In his search for a third partner Jack comes across the tough, but sexy Olive. When the robbery goes wrong, secret double crosses are revealed and the tension builds towards an explosive, surprising finale in this dark and stylish modern-day film noir.

Other films shown at the Festival, such as Andy Amadi Okoroafor's Relentless, sound as if they possess potentially noir elements as well. The popular film industries of Africa, including Nigeria's "Nollywood" (which produces 1,000 to 2,000 video features per year), are said to often deal with crime and corruption, which are pressing issues in Africal life:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/arts/film-when-there-s-too-much-of-a-not-very-good-thing.html

Most of the films are very cheaply made, undoubtedly quite rough, yet it could be fascinating to see how noir, which is nothing if not adaptable, transforms itself yet again in the context of an emergent continent with its share of troubles.

A bit of a real-life noir tale is playing itself out in the unresolved death last week of a very popular young Tanzanian actor, 28-year-old Steven Kanumba, who acted in Nollywood films:

http://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/OpEd/comment/Lets+not+turn+Kanumbas+death+into+a+cheap+film+noir+/-/434750/1386272/-/6049rwz/-/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Kanumba

Kanumba was a prolific actor, writer, and director in the young industry, as his Wikipedia entry attests, but such is the paucity of information available on Nollywood, the IMDB only knows two of his credits:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2877261/

Noir of the Week - Romance de fieras (Mexico, 1955)

[Cross-posted from The Blackboard.]

Like many Mexican noir films, Ismael Rodriguez’s 1955 Romance de fieras (Savage Romance) is actually a romantic melodrama with noir shadings, akin to a Humoresque. But however one categorizes it, it’s a smashing film. It wastes absolutely no time getting started. Our youthful hero Javier Ponce (Joaquin Cordero), recently licensed as an attorney, is scanning newspaper want ads on a Mexico City sidewalk in front of a café, when suddenly, a shot rings out from within! Javier races inside to find industrialist Carlos Narvaez (Carlos Orellana) with a smoking gun in his hand, his best friend and fellow businessman Federico de Alba dead on the floor in front of him. “I need an attorney!” he cries – his own having fled the restaurant as soon as matters looked serious – and Javier is not only right there, but dressed as if to enter court that minute. In the space of a a few screen minutes, he has got himself a case, an acquittal on the grounds that the weapon was discharged accidentally, and a new surrogate father.

The father-son warmth between Narvaez and Ponce is complicated by the existence of Narvaez’s actual son Ricardo (Armando Calvo), a playboy ne’er-do-well who takes an immediate dislike to his rival as a mere middle-class arriviste. Javier holds his own in all their encounters, full of little verbal jabs back and forth. One of the several “character plots” of the movie is the ongoing cockfight between these two. Naturally we root for Javier, an orphan whose maiden aunts Milagros and Remedios (non-homicidal versions of the pair in Arsenic and Old Lace) put him through school and also raised his younger brother.

Joaquin Cordero was 33 when Romance de fieras was released, in the early stages of a very successful career as a leading man; he is still active in television and film today, one of the grand old men of Mexican cinema who will turn 90 this August 16. The best comparison I can think of for his particular blend of good looks and acting talent is William Holden (take that as very high praise).

Armando Calvo, who oozes insincerity and untrustworthiness in this movie, would also have a successful career, splitting his time between Mexico and Spain (where his father Juan Calvo was also a well-known actor).

Carlos Orellana was a triple threat as a character actor, writer (he co-wrote the Romance de fieras screenplay with Ismael Rodriguez, from Asuncion Aiza Banduni’s novel), and director.

The movie bounces back and forth between Mexico City and Javier Ponce’s home-town of Patzcuaro in Michoacan State on Mexico’s west coast. He has bought his dotty aunts a new house, and is keeping a hand in with the rearing of his teen-age brother. His re-appearance on the home-town scene as a tall, handsome, charming, successful, and single young attorney has all the local gals swooning, but none can compete with Patricia (Veronica Loyo), who is exceedingly pretty and knows it, and swoops in for the kill in record time. Although Veronica Loyo faded from the film scene in the Sixties, she nails all of her scenes here, in what has to be one of the most likable portraits of an unabashed husband-hunter in film history. Her style is to announce her strategies up-front and then dare Javier to resist them; she’s adorable.

But there is a another type of romance besides her practical, let’s-get-down-to-business-and-start-planning-the-wedding manner, and naturally the movie must put up a darker, moodier, crazier – “savage” – love as Patricia’s competition. Her parents have rented out a palatial country estate that just happens to be in their property portfolio, to a mysterious young woman known – wouldn’t you guess? - as “La misteriosa” (Martha Roth). She lives there in semi-seclusion with several servants and a small pack of ferocious dogs, playing Chopin for hours on end as her tears wet the keyboard. The dogs tear an intruder to death early on, all in a week in the countryside apparently, because it isn’t mentioned again – but whenever the movie needs an air of threat, there they are snarling and straining at their chains. They will figure in the finale, of course.

It isn’t long before a curious Javier starts trespassing his way onto La misteriosa’s estate, despite being told by its mistress to desist. On his second visit, she goes to tear his hair out, and he pins her to the ground as blood trickles down his forehead. In an erotically charged series of close-ups he leans in for a forced kiss and perhaps more, but backs off immediately as his face tells us that, passion notwithstanding, he doesn’t really fancy himself a rapist. This intense minute is one of many places in the film where Ismael Rodriguez shows himself to be a director of force. Rodriguez abundantly demonstrates an individual visual style, both in that telling use of close-ups and in his very characteristic overhead or elevated camera positions.

Martha Roth, who was born in Italy and moved to Mexico as a young girl, is a striking presence, who has not merely the air of a Bronte heroine but of a Bronte sister; I’d cast her as Emily without a minute’s hesitation. She is not as conventionally beautiful as Veronica Loyo, but she is unquestionably “misteriosa,” and as with all the contrasts in the film, this one is played to the hilt. She is “maldita,” she tells Ponce – cursed, damned. Will she take him down with her? (Roth and Cordero are great together; this would not be their only co-starring movie.)

The alternation between the comic scenes with the aunts and pert, scheming Patricia, and the Gothicky romantic scenes with La misteriosa, is splendidly effective. One of the dramatic strategies of the film is that every time Patricia is getting somewhere with Javier, they are interrupted. After she serenades him in a moonlight scene on the bank of the famously romantic Lake Patzcuaro (shot on location), he leans in for his first kiss, but they are both startled by the sudden appearance of La misteriosa standing in the prow of a boat skimming by, seemingly practicing to be a masthead – it is laugh-out-loud funny. On the evening of their marriage negotiation, he makes a sudden startling discovery, and has to run off. On the evening of their actual wedding, he receives an urgent phone call, and has to run off. If Patricia believed in omens, she would see that the fates themselves are scheming against her…

The movie has lots of plot, which all ties together. Senor Narvaez passes away while Javier is in Patzcuaro, but not before narrating a complex death-bed explanation of what really happened on the day he “killed” his best friend, and a set of instructions. Ricardo is disinherited by his father, and Javier has to find the new, gone-missing heir before Ricardo himself does. It is someone they both know, but Javier doesn’t realize this…

One of the joys of the second half of the movie is Javier’s teaming up with Senor Narvaez’s bespectacled plain-Jane secretary Magda (Emma Rodriguez) to carry out the dead man’s difficult instructions. Emma Rodriguez is an extremely capable comic actress, and her character is a delight, whether she is getting drunk for the first time at a night-club, or trying to handle her own ordinary-guy boyfriend (who is bound to get jealous of all the time she is spending with glamour-boy Javier), or offering Javier some brass-tacks romantic advice when he goes on a despairing bender himself.

The last half-hour of the film juggles so many different tones – comic detective work, surprise appearances of various kinds, family melodrama involving Javier’s kid brother, mucho talk of “destiny,” and a completely over-the-top concluding sequence that plays like a cross between Hitchcock and Puccini, and that seems about to peak and end several times before those dogs inevitably show up. Do not go to Mexican cinema for mousy, temperate denouements; Ismael Rodriguez insists that you get your money’s-worth before leaving the theater. But he pulls it all off triumphantly, and still manages to shift back into comic mode for the concluding scene (as Hitch does in the 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much). I’ll say it again: this is a smashing film.

A DVD with English subtitles that will play in both Region 1 (USA) and Region 4 (Mexico) DVD players is available readily and inexpensively though Amazon.

The Friends of Frank Lovejoy Present: Radio Noir of the Week - The Blue Beetle

[Cross-posted from The Blackboard.]

The inceptions of the Golden Age of Superhero Comics (Action Comics #1, April 18, 1938) and the Golden Age of Film Noir (Stranger on the Third Floor, August 16, 1940) come fairly close in time, only two years apart. Although the two trends went their own ways, it is certainly possible to argue that they had common roots in popular reactions to the Great Depression of the 1930s – indeed, it would be harder to argue that they did not have that in common – and they would continue to have some points of contact, notably the 17 Superman cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios/Famous Studios between 1941 and 1943, which are gorgeously noir in their look.

Technically speaking, there is a distinction to be made between true superheroes who possess superhuman powers, such as Superman and the Flash, and costumed crime fighters who have no actual superpowers but who do employ some fairly advanced proprietary technologies, such as Batman and Green Arrow. Costumed crime fighters have a slightly longer pedigree than superheroes, whose lineage effectively starts with Superman in 1938; earlier examples of costumed crime fighters include the Phantom, the Green Hornet, and the Clock, all debuting in 1936, and even they are pre-dated by Zorro (1919).

The original Blue Beetle, who first appeared just a few months after Batman in 1939, falls into the category of costumed crime fighters. (The Blue Beetle concept, like so many of these, has a long and complicated afterlife, with several incarnations of the character appearing in various comics universes right up until the present.) He was a Fox Comics property launched in Mystery Men Comics #1, and he continued to appear in that title, as well as a self-titled comic book up through 1950.

The Beetle begins as an ordinary rookie cop named Dan Garret(t) who, believing that desperate times call for desperate measures, undertakes to fight criminals in an extra-judicial way, first wearing just a mask, then donning a nifty bullet-proof costume made of chain-mesh “as flexible as silk, and stronger than steel.” He collaborates with local pharmacist Dr. Franz, who creates not only the costume but other enhancements as time goes along, including a mega-vitamin that starts to push the Beetle into superpowers territory.

The Blue Beetle character must have sold a lot of comic books, because fairly swiftly he got his own radio program, something which even Batman never did (although Superman scored one). It was short-lived, though, only broadcast for five months in the middle of 1940. The Blue Beetle ran as 15-minute segments, two of which made a whole story (unlike the more complex The Adventures of Superman radio series, which eventually ran stories of up to 33 15-minute episodes). There were 48 Blue Beetle episodes and 24 stories.

Every reference source I looked at indicated that our boy Frank Lovejoy played the Blue Beetle for the first 13 episodes, and was then replaced by an uncredited voice actor who has never been identified. Something about that seemed wrong: why would they change actors between episodes 13 and 14, which would fall in the middle of a two-part story? Fortunately, I was able to check this, since the majority of Blue Beetle segments, including #13-14, are available here:

http://www.radiolovers.com/pages/bluebeetle.htm

My hunch was correct; Lovejoy was not replaced mid-story. He appears in #11-12 (“Death Rides on Horseback”), and the new actor takes over for #13-14 (“Death Strikes from the East”). The repetition of the error in different sources derives from the same simple fact that has always bedeviled encyclopedias: they are compiled mainly from other encyclopedias, not from original research. So once a non-obvious error appears, it circulates.

For the purposes of this Radio NOTW, I listened to #7-8, “Blasting the Dynamite Ring” (not “Blasting [the] Dynamite Gang,” as the reference sources have it).

http://www.radiolovers.com/shows/B/BlueBeetle/BlueBeetle-Chapter07-08-BlastingDynamiteGang.mp3

A criminal gang headed by “the Octopus” is blowing up sites around Dan Garret’s unnamed city, leading Dan to comment to Dr. Franz: “I think it’s a diabolical plan of wholesale robbery, backed by terrorism and blackmail!...These men are desperate characters, and their chief is a cold-blooded fiend.”

Indeed, they will stop at nothing. Before we know it, they are demanding that the city shut down its electricity (the better for their looting), and threatening the widower mayor’s young son Tom, who does wind up being kidnapped. The mayor is quite naturally beside himself: “Now I must get back to my office and plan a campaign that will rid the city forever of this criminal scum!”

The Blue Beetle confronts the criminals, who, nonplussed that their bullets aren’t penetrating his chain-mail, just knock him out instead. He winds up imprisoned with plucky young Tom, who is excited as heck: “Me help the Blue Beetle! Gee!” Of course between them, they find a way to take the Octopus down. The climax illustrates one of the limitations of radio, which is that it can have a slightly hard time handling action sequences. So Tom has to report the action to us by talking to himself as the Blue Beetle out-swims the Octopus’s getaway motor-boat (neat trick). “Oh boy, can that Blue Beetle swim! Look at those strokes he takes!”

In the aftermath, Tom reminds the Beetle that as the rescuer of the mayor’s son, he’s in for a whopping big reward, which of course decent Dan gracefully declines: “The Blue Beetle seeks no reward, Tom. What he does, he does for humanity.” Instead, he’s off to his next adventure, to foil slot-machine racketeers who are preying on carnival-goers. The announcer solemnly asks, “Can the Blue Beetle protect amusement seekers against dishonest exploitation?” (Best of luck on that.)

It’s all quite a lot of juvenile fun, which ought to arouse nostalgic memories even for those of us who weren’t alive at the time! I particularly like the organ riffs for the scene transitions.

You can learn more about the Blue Beetle on these pages:

http://www.wonderworldcomics.com/bluebeetle/Radio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Beetle

RIP Pierre Schoendoerffer

Pierre Schoendoerffer (1928-2012), director, screenwriter, documentarist, novelist, made one of my favorite movies of all time, Le Crabe-Tambour (The Drummer-Crab), based on his own novel, in 1977. As a dramatic tale of the sea, it's up there with Moby Dick, and I'm not exaggerating one iota. Godard's frequent collaborator Raoul Coutard was responsible for the breathtaking nautical cinematography. Although this is the only Schoendoerffer film I have been lucky enough to see, he was by no means a one-hit wonder; he won best screenplay at Cannes in 1965 for The 317th Platoon, and an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 1967 for The Anderson Platoon (which is about the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, an obsessive subject for him; he was at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and later made an epic about it).

Schoendoerffer worked with or adapted other great French writers: Joseph Kessel (the author of the novels that Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows and Luis Bunuel's Belle de Jour are based on); Jean Larteguy (author of the acclaimed war novel The Centurions); Jorge Semprun (author of the screenplays for Costa-Gavras's Z and The Confession, and Alain Resnais's La guerre est finie and Stavisky); Pierre Loti (two of whose neglected novels he made into films). John Milius made Schoendoerffer's own novel Farewell to the King into a movie with Nick Nolte in 1989.

I suspect that Schoendoerffer's entire creative output, always valued in France (where he served as President of the Academie des Beaux-Arts), will at some point receive a thorough (and deserved) international assessment.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9144269/Pierre-Schoendoerffer.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Schoendoerffer

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006954/

Teaching Notes: A Warning for the 21st Century

In my Introduction to Social Sciences classes, we are nearing the end of our Economics unit. A very bright and capable young woman who knew plenty of econ before entering the class called me over at the end of one session and asked, "Mr. Harris, do you think that capitalism could collapse? Are you worried about it?" I had to confess that I was, and we had a really good conversation, which led to my adding a section to the tail-end of my teaching notes for tomorrow's classes on Economic Indicators. I don't often use my teaching platform as a soapbox, but somehow in this case, I think it's a good idea.

A warning for the 21st century

Investors are understandably very interested in the rates of return on their investments

In today’s economic world, a lot of people make a lot of money by just moving a lot of value and pseudo-value around

And they do it very fast, in micro-seconds; trading computers are programmed with algorithms (formulas) that tell them when to buy, when to sell, when to do other things

These days, it’s all a speed competition = my computer is faster than your computer

Pseudo-value = money in the money supply that may have been created by government fiat in the form of currency, or by commercial banks in the form of loans (deposit multiplication), but that is not actually backed by real increases in the economy’s productiveness

At some point, all those billions and trillions of “value” that show up as digits on computer screens have to relate back to real people making real stuff for which there is or will be a real demand

Otherwise, the economy is an empty game and it will end badly

TED Talkers

A short piece at The Millions links to three longer articles "hating on TED" and the "public intellectuals" and wannabes who crowd it:

http://www.themillions.com/2012/03/ted-is-dead.html

As these glamorati yap and network their way from conference to conference, getting off on their personal branding, I don’t see the world becoming a noticeably better place from all the hot air being expelled. Years ago, Thomas Merton wrote of the danger of becoming associated with, and therefore the representative and inevitable defender of, any particular set of ideas; he felt that it could only limit him as a thinker. Before the concept of personal branding was branded, he was wholeheartedly against it. And that is one reason why Merton is a profound, unpinnable thinker (just as Freud is not a Freudian, and Marx is not a Marxist), while Richard Saul Wurman, Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and David Brooks, for all their occasional virtues, are not. Rather, they are mainly pseudo-intellectual opportunists for whom the conference world (along with the obligatory appearances on Charlie Rose, etc.) is just another way of growing their bottom line. If they and their ilk have anything genuine to offer amidst all the publicity-mongering, I'll try to figure that out. As far as their making the scene goes, however, even though they may be consumed by it, why should I care? Never let yourself be used by people who are primarily trying to get excited about themselves - not even by clicking on their links, harmless though that may seem. For politicians, actors, and conference talkers, including the talented ones, attention, like the ability to hob-nob with others at their wattage level, is primarily a masturbatory aid. Remember Faye Dunaway in Network, climaxing as she goes on about ratings shares? Like that.

Found on the Web: The Sinking of the Lusitania

As often as possible, I want my students to read information in their textbook or other sources, hear it from me in class, and see it on screen. So whenever I prepare a lesson these days in any of my subjects, I poke around YouTube to see if I can find any interesting and relevant videos, and quite often I come up with unexpected gems. I like to mix up documentary footage, bits of dramatizations, videos created expressly for the Web, other students' posted projects, humorous takes, musical takes, older educational productions (which now have a period charm(, cartoons, materials in Spanish, and so on.

In the midst of my prep for teaching World War I, I discovered an incredible documentary/propaganda short created in 1918 by the great cartoonist and experimental animator Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), based on The Sinking of the Lusitania by a German U boat in May 1915 - one of those events that pushed the United States a little closer to entering the Great War on the Allied side, which it eventually did do in April, 1917. McCay and his assistants drew 25,000 cels for this unusual and beautiful piece.